@Greymattersuit The issue of a global pandemic is not a quip, it was just an example of how hard it is to predict the future, and I do not intend it to belittle the threats you list, nor will any pandemic drive us to extinction that is not how they work, that idea is silly and was certainly not what I meant. Quite the contary, I merely throw it in as another threat. And it should not be dismissed because there are already signs that our ability to provide quarantine is breaking down, there may not be effective anti-biotics soon, there is an increasing anti-medicine movement and as global resources lessen, sea levels rise etc. there will be increasing uncontroled migrations and famines which always raise the risk, nor should you count on things like the WHO being able to survive themselves, plus an increasing threat from planned bio-engineered pathogens. The fact is that we have enjoyed a short period of a century or so when we managed, thanks to rapidly improving technology and the exploitation of massive resources, to escape for infection for both our selves and our food supplies. That period will come to an end maybe soon, and so possibily will medicine as an effective force in human life.

I am not an anti environmentalist. and do think that atll of the things you list are serious threats, and would like to see a sustainable world. In the short term, perhaps twenty years most models are good; but when once you begin to get beyond that then the effects of chaos begin to take hold. And governments who trust in such models are simply either trying to delude people that they have an understanding of the future, which they don't, or are themselves being taken in by a profit making futureology industry, who wish to sell as much of their product as possible.

In my youth when still in the education system I had the chance to observe the working of a government think tank, which aimed to foresee the future, and made a number of predictions, some of which I do not remember, but only forty five years on I do remember that the predictions made for the next half century were very consistent, they were all wrong.

@Greymattersuit What you're claiming as facts are actually predictions. They may be high-confidence predictions but until they actually occur, they are not facts.

@MojoDave You hit my point exactly, but have said it better and more succinctly.

@Greymattersuit 2085..we'll look the same..

@Greymattersuit I have to disagree on the 6th extinction. Extinctions deal with species, not individuals. Read 'Ends of the World' by Peter Brannen about the 5 largest extinctions ever. Scientists in that book laugh about reports of a 6th extinction. People who make claims about a 6th simply don't understand the scale of an actual extinction.